Abstract:Well-designed affordable housing involves more than the provision of safe, decent, and inexpensive shelter; it needs to be central to the resilience of cities. Framing the issue as a matter of “what affordable housing should afford” expands the agenda for housing designers to consider factors that extend beyond the physical boundaries of buildings and engage the social, economic, environmental, and political relationships that connect housing to cities. To maximize its capacity to support the resilience of cities, affordable housing should engage as many as possible of the following four criteria: (1) support the community social structure and economic livelihoods of residents, (2) reduce the vulnerability of residents to environmental risks and stresses, (3) enhance the personal security of residents in the face of violence or threats of displacement, and (4) empower communities
through enhanced capacities to share in their own governance. We illustrate these principles with four examples from recent practice—two illustrating the struggle for everyday affordable housing (in San Francisco and in Iquique, Chile) and two describing the special circumstances that result in the aftermath of disaster (in New Orleans and in Banda Aceh, Indonesia). Taken together, these examples demonstrate what is at stake if we ask affordable housing design to serve the greater goal of city resilience. To read more-click here

2.“Public Housing in the United States: Neighborhood Renewal and the Poor”

Abstract:This book chapter considers the tortuous and tortured saga of public housing in the United States, viewing it as a kind of double social experiment: first when it was built–under the high modernist hopes of the mid-20th century–and again, as the 20th century closed, when it was redeveloped to mimic a pre-modernist urbanism. In both phases, planners and designers promised new and improved housing for low-income households, clearing slums the first time and, in the second iteration, clearing public housing itself. The chapter traces both the evolution of public housing and the corresponding way that scholars and practicing planners have responded to it. This means 1) coming to terms with the rationales behind the initial enthusiasm for public housing, 2) contending with the ‘rise and fall’ critiques that soon followed, and 3) assessing more contemporary revisionist efforts to defend, re-invent, replace, or simply eliminate this form of deeply-subsidized housing.
“Planners hear housing as a verb; architects hear it as a noun; but residents hear it as “my home.” Achieving progress on the relationship among housing, planning, and people means remembering that housing is always simultaneously a process, a piece of the built environment, and an emotional attachment to a place.” (excerpt)
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Abstract:It is vital to acknowledge the socio-political complexity of the deployment of the term ‘resilience’ and to develop a more unified set of expectations for the professions and disciplines that use it. Applied to cities, resilience is particularly problematic, yet also retains promise. Like resilience, the term ‘city’ is also subject to multiple contending definitions,depending on the scale and on whether the focus is on physical spaces or social communities. Due to cities and city regions being organized in ways that both produce and reflect underlying socio-economic disparities, some parts are much more resilient than others and therefore vulnerability is often linked to both topography and income. Uneven resilience threatens the ability of cities as a whole to function economically, socially and politically. Resilience can only remain useful as a concept and as progressive practice if it is explicitly associated with the need to improve the life prospects of disadvantaged groups. This dimension is often lost in definitions of resilience drawn from engineering and ecology, but remains central to conceptualizations linked to social psychology. To improve the prospects of cities proactively (and reactively), there is a need to unify the insights from the multiple professions and disciplines that use ‘resilience’. To read more- click here

4.From Public Housing to Public- Private Housing: 75 Years of American Social Experimentation

Abstract: American public housing since 1937 is often viewed as a single failed experiment of architecture, management, and policy. This view masks a much more highly differentiated experience for residents and housing authorities, rooted in a long-term moral and ideological struggle over the place of the poorest residents in American cities. This article reframes public housing history as a succession of informal social experiments: initial public efforts to clear out slum-dwellers and instead accommodate barely poor working-class tenants or the worthy elderly; a 30-year interlude, where public housing authorities consolidated the poorest into welfare housing while gradually shifting responsibility for low-income housing to private landlords, private developers, and private investors; and a series of partnerships since 1990 that reserve more of this public-private housing for a less-poor constituency. Empirically, this article provides an unprecedented graphic glimpse into the ways that the overall mode-share of public housing has shifted and diversified. Ultimately, this article reveals that the reduced role of the public sector has curtailed the growth of deeply subsidized housing provision to the lowest-income Americans. To read more- click here

5.Illogical Housing Aid

Authors: Lawrence J. Vale and Y. Freemark
Publisher: The New York Times, October 30 2012

Abstract: THE tax deduction for mortgage interest may not quite be the “third rail” of politics that Social Security is, but politicians on both sides have long been afraid to touch it. So when Mitt Romney recently floated the idea of capping this deduction, Democrats pounced.
Here, after all, was Mr. Romney arguing to cut a long-favored tax benefit for middle-class homeowners — in the midst of a soft housing market, no less — so as to make up lost revenue from his proposed tax cuts that, critics say, disproportionately benefit the wealthy. To read more-click here

Abstract: The world is urbanizing, but neither easily nor evenly. Modern cities are being shaped by top-down, forward-looking, skyline-transforming, neighborhood-renewing, tourism-enhancing, creatively-destroying, global-investment-enticing forces of change. Yet these same forces exert conflicting pressures on the poorest urban neighborhoods, and so cities are being shaped as well by bottom-up, self-organizing, citizen-activist movements that are struggling to oppose the displacement that so often accompanies real estate development. It is this interplay between the dominant narrative of progress and prosperity and the counter-narratives of protest and resistance that gives early 21st-century cities their distinct dynamism. These struggles are especially magnified when cities become the setting for mega-events that attract both frenzied local development and global scrutiny — none more so than the Summer Olympic Games. To read more- click here

Abstract: Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.
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